PHP 5.4 multipart/form-data UTF-8 encoding

Question

I'm having problem with UTF-8 encoding while posting form data as "multipart/form-data", without multipart/form-data everything works well. But since I have to upload files on same post, I need to use multipart/form-data.

Problem started after upgrading from PHP 5.3.x to PHP 5.4.4-14 (bundled with Debian Wheezy), same scripts works well with PHP 5.3 test server.

• All of my documents are saved in UTF-8 and has <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"> tags.
• I tested with different browsers on different computers
• mb_detect_encoding() detects posted string as UTF-8
• I tried AddDefaultCharset utf-8 for Apache configuration.

Here you can test my scripts, you can copy/paste following string with Turkish characters (ex. string: öçşipğopüp )

http://sa.chelona.com.tr/haber-ekle.html

I also found related question at UTF-8 text is garbled when form is posted as multipart/form-data in PHP but it recommends re-installing apache/php and that's not possible for my situation. Is this a known PHP/Apache bug?

Answer 1

Do a simple conversion from UTF-8 to Turkish Alphabet ISO-8859-9 and the problem should be solved

iconv('UTF-8', "ISO-8859-9", $string);

Example Input : öçşipğopüp

Example Form:

<form method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data" action ="self.php">
<input type="text" name="hello" />
<input type="submit" name="test" />
</form>

Simple Sump :

var_dump($_POST['hello'],iconv('UTF-8', "ISO-8859-9", $_POST['hello']));

Output

string 'öçşipğopüp ' (length=16)
string 'öçþipðopüp ' (length=11)

Answer 2

I'm writing this to answer my own question... I hope it will help somebody else...

if you use PHP 5.4.x, setting mbstring.http_input from "auto" to "pass" may solve your problem.

Answer 3

My php version is 5.4.45 and changing mbstring.http_input from auto to pass works very well. In php.ini file the default value is pass. For more detail about this variable you can see here.